Janet Evanovich Quotes

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

The main character in the book is usually someone you're identifying with because the story is being told through this person's mind.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like 'Downriver' is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

I try to have something in common with my protagonists, especially when I'm writing in the first person.

My job as an actor is to just tell the story as best I can from my character's point of view and let the audience decide.